Review from a writer's perspective: Disconnected by Lisa M. Cronkhite

Explore and extend your writer's tool box. Checkout my review on Good reads.

Disconnected by Lisa M Cronkhite

Lisa's book coming out June 3rd 2014 explores schizophrenia and tests the normal writing conventions of tension through dialog. In fact, much of the book is constructed around interior dialog between the two aspects within the main character's mind.https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18669436-disconnected

Review: David Baldacci's new YA fantasy THE FINISHER--not your normal Baldacci.

Mixed feelings on this. Would love your take on it if you read it.

The Finisher by David Baldacci  For aspiring writers, obtain a hard copy and edit the omniscient recaps and Mary Sue* angst out. Then read the flow to see an immediate improvement to the writing style. What were the editors and Baldacci thinking?

Goodreads review:
Starts slow; ends strong. Labelled as a stand-alone but feels like the first in a series. NOT FOR THE CRIME FICTION BALDACCI FANS. BE FOREWARNED. THE TITLE IS NOT AN ASSASSIN.

As a writer, I'm warned against so many things--which Baldacci (if this is truly Baldacci) breaks in this fantasy. Something the crime fiction writer Baldacci would never do. First, the MC begins weak and spends too much time mentally verbalizing her situation when the action and dialog clearly are sufficient. This is so agonizingly repeated and time consuming that I twice put the book down. The editors weren't tough enough, didn't bother, or the author wasn't up to the task. Crime fiction writer Baldacci knows better. So what the heck is going on? This was fixable, but wasn't.

The main character goes around obtaining magical items like a common & boring RPG game--all with too much Mary Sue angst. Yes, she grows into the power she obtains, but she falls and trips into them. She is constantly agonizing over her interior conflicts--that are no brainers for even the weak minded. Then you're hit once again by the ever yet repeated omniscient character voice, "If I had known this would happen, I wouldn't..." Then you live through what is going to happen. Complete novice writer foolishness. So frustratingly irritating. This was fixable, but wasn't.

The world is rich and unique but full of inconsistencies and the main character is too easily provided luck happenstance which is basic scifi/fantasy 'never do' rules. Again a clear sign of weak writing. Again, this was fixable, but wasn't.

"Yet, you give it a four star? What's with that, Meg?" you ask. Because it was fixable and the underlying story is worth the read and the frustration. Even I, an inept editor at best, could have made this worlds better with more tightening. In fact, I heard this rather than read the book. If I'd had the hard copy, I would have crossed off every foolish recap out of sheer anger.

The ending redeems it. The one on one Hunger Game-y type ending works although the reason for it being in the book is not explained, nor why this year--of all the world's history--adds in its 2nd class women to fight. At least it wasn't on a platter and she had to go through some clever plot twists to be included as a younger. (Redeeming feature.)

Why would Baldacci chose to write this barely disguised RPG? Does he have a young daughter ready to take off on her own? If so, okay. I see where it came from. It provides moral guidance and advice. It has super tension in the last 2/3s proving that the author has what it takes to sustain an excellent story, but will he do so?(Again, Baldacci has the proven skill...) Was this a case of a major adult writer saying, "It's just young adult?" I can't believe that David Baldacci would do that. This is simply too different from his other works--and more importantly an entirely DIFFERENT WRITING STYLE AND VOICE--so different that I again ask, "Did Baldacci really write this?"

If it had been properly edited, this could be a new Harry Potter--even a prequel to Harry Potter. The world does have incredible similarities. (Could it be there was another writer? I don't know and my mind can spin conspiracies.) I hope, if there are further books, the editors will actually put their hearts into helping Baldacci raise the bar considerably.

It also gets 4 stars for aspiring writers. Take your pen and get busy editing a hard copy and see how you can easily elevate, so damn easily, raising it to 5 stars.

*Unfamiliar with the term Mary Sue? Google it. I've included Priscella Spencer's Harry Potter's list that you'll need to modify. You'll have to move down to sections 3, 4, & 6 for the obvious ones here.

DON'T take me wrong. An author includes herself in every character, but the heavy interior angst in this book screams self-insertion--the author providing a point of view that is the character's.

The Excitement Builds! New Poisoned Pencil submission video is up!

The wonderful press publishing my new contemporary YA crime fiction has a great new video up on YouTube. Come take a peek and consider joining us.

http://www.youtube.com/user/thepoisonedpencil/videos

Professional Writing Associations

I've been a member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) for several years. Their advice and mentoring has been invaluable. With the signing of the two book YA contemporary crime fiction, a new world has opened up.

I've joined the Mystery Writers of America, and I've now applied to International Thriller Writers. I'm amazed at the membership benefits. I can't wait to take a comprehensive class with the ITW, but it will have to wait until next year. Maybe one day, I can help teach one.

This year, I'm slated for a master's class with author Jim Butcher this May, a second weekend class with Brett Anthony Johnston from Harvard at the University of Iowa's Summer Writer's Festival in July, and then I lucked out with a late opening lottery attendance spot for my second visit to the Writer's Police Academy in September. An MFA would be nice, but this year continues my alternative route to becoming the best I can be.

In the future, my transportation funds will go to promotion, but this year feels like a grand jewel for raising my writing skills and building that every growing writer's toolbox.

There is one organization that I want to add, but I've not yet to qualify--the Science Fiction Writer's of America (SFWA). Maybe I'll find time this year to also shop one of my SciFi short stories...

New Ideas from Interesting Places

Refreshed and invigorated from Desert Nights Rising Stars writing conference this past weekend, I've added to my writer's tool box. I look forward to exercising the tools and applying them.

My debt of gratitude to the organizers from Arizona State (including author Jewell Parker Rhodes and Karen Sideris) and instructors, including YA authors Bill Konigsberg and Tom Leveen. Colors Michael Schiffer and Jay Boyer who was a Carnegie Foundation Arizona Professor of the year brought new insight into screenwriting structure and dialog. Like many writer's conference, the screenwriting sessions opened new ideas on constructing and composing dialog. Barbara Peters shared book marketing advice. it was a delight to meet Allison Moore from Little Brown again. There was a crime fic/mystery panel with author's Deborah Ledford, Dana Stabenow, and T Jefferson Parker--again different points of view to open my creative mind. And they were just part of a wonderful weekend.

My sci/fi friends will be unhappy that I didn't have time for the workshops involving Alan Dean Foster, Michael A Stackpole, or Gary Cook. Alan did read one night. And I had no time for literary fiction and poetry sessions that in the past have proven invaluable. There simply wasn't time.

If you decide to attend a writer's conference, remember that networking and learning is only a small part of what takes place. Although, I took copious notes that I meticulously e-file for future use, it's the opening of the writer's ear, mind, and eye that proves most valuable. Often my note taking slipped away as I organized a new thought shared and how it would mesh in my current work.

That new view points stays with you for a long time after you've packed up and head home. I desperately try to keep that new view point fresh and present for several months until the next conference.

I'll post later on how Michael's insights shifted and confirmed some deep structural decisions I've made in my 2nd Kami Files manuscript. as I sat and watched the interestingly different film 3 Days to Kill. The scenes with the overlapping dialog and film like the learning to ride the bicycle one is exactly what I'm trying to create with the plot threads in my manuscript. The threads cross several decades and I've been afraid that it wouldn't work due to lack of talent and tools on my part. Just seeing those film scenes with my new point of view gives me hope that confirms the end result can be powerful. I may still not manage it, but I'm going to get damn close to getting it right.

Ten Suggestions for Reading in Public

Ten Suggestions for Reading in Public

Once your book is published you become passive and the reader becomes active. The dynamics change when you read your work in public. Now you are back in charge in the most wonderful way. You make decisions about how the listener will hear your words. Here’s how. For ease, let’s use the beginning of the Gettysburg Address. Of the five handwritten originals, this one is from the ABC website. Use it as your template for the exercises.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

Goal One: CLARITY - Place a forward slash between the words AND every syllable. Read it out loud with a heartbeat pause at each slash. It feels un-natural, but trust me. The pause gives the word following importance in the ear of your listener. Note how the written comma, semi-colon, and period mean nothing to the reader getting the meaning across. More on this later.

Goal Two: BREATHE - Take time to breathe; chart it. A dramatic pause is NOT a giant gasp to gather oxygen for a deprived body. Learn to plan when to breathe in your oral interpretation notes.

Goal Three: VENUE – Don’t be comfortable. Your goal is to be active, not passive like you’ll feel in a comfy easy chair. Instead hang onto a podium or lean against a stool.

Goal Four: EMPHASIS – Pick out the words you want to emphasize and those you want to de-emphasize. Now vary the pause with a relative importance using one / for heartbeat, // for two, and /// for three. See example below. (Notice that the comma often is followed by unimportant words—like ‘a’, ‘and’, ‘as’. Periods are followed by ‘now’, ‘we’. I doubt those are the words deserving the importance the pause places on them. When reading out loud you barely break at those grammar marks which were so important when seeing them on the page. You are reading to someone’s ear.)

Four score and seven years ago our /fathers brought forth on this continent, a /new //nation, /conceived in Li/ber/ty, and ///dedicated to the proposition that ///all //men are /created //equal.

Try different combinations and hear the difference. You make the choice of importance through conscious decisions of what YOU want to stress.

Goal Five: VOLUME – underline words you want to say louder. Whereas the pauses provide importance to words, volume provides hard substance. In the example above draw a single underline mark beneath 'new', 'conceived', 'dedicated'. Double underline ‘all’ and triple underline ‘equal’. Increase your volume on single underlines, louder for double, and still louder for triple.

Goal Six: MELODY – Now you play with the forward marks and the underlined volume marks. Notice, as you read, how the increase in volume on one word leads to a new gentle or perhaps violent dawning for the next in line. Look at ‘/new //nation’.  You can roll gently off the increased volume of ‘new’ into an elongated and even louder ‘nation’, giving it an awe inspiring elegance. By this point, you’ve moved the 2D words to 3D and given them a forward movement. Use vocal variance from soprano to bass to color the work and give it a melody. No monotones!

Goal Seven: PACE – If you thought you were harsh with your editing knife writing your first pages, it will be baby play compared to this step. You can’t emphasize every word through an extended reading. You’ll bore your listeners. They crave the pauses, but too many and you deaden their ears. Therefore, you chose what is important and what is not. Every word is important and must be perfectly clear, but you must decide what is MOST important. Then you learn to crisply rush over the less important. The listener accepts it, but will CRAVE the paused & volume controlled important words.

This means you can virtually run sentences together, completely ignore prepositional phrases, and all sorts of things to attain your goal. Sometimes things like a long series of prepositional phrases so pretty to the eye on the page, get be just as lyrical as you bounce quickly across the surface of them for your listeners.  “Over the bridge and through the snow to…” The bridge and the snow aren’t important words--over and through are. The phrases add flavor and beats that lead up to the important /grandmother’s /house we go. There is a great short story by John Greene, I think, that is filled with tension and suspense, but just before each ‘got you’ moment he lulls the reader with beautiful ten or twelve prepositional phrases. Then BOOM.

Goal Eight: EMOTIONAL TONE – We’ve changed your words from 2D on the page to 3D for the listener’s ear and given it forward motion and drive. Now we add EMOTION or more accurately an EMOTIONAL HOME. You won’t read about a death with the same tone as reading about two kids playing in the sandbox. Smile when you answer a phone and the person on the other end will hear it. Imagine your pet dying and your words convey sadness. Find emotion in your printed words and let it out. Don’t act it out, but let your voice hold the emotion. If you want to get clinical, it’s a matter of tightness in your vocal box and facial expression, perhaps use your hands, and the all incredible vibrato you can add like an opera singer can. Yeah, that one takes practice—so keep it simple.

Goal Nine and Ten: HAVE FUN – and so will your readers.

Great Story First & the Trouble with Mary Sue Characters

Stuffing your tool box, improving your craft—those are your goals, not publication. All the world class marketing and publicity ideas can’t make up for the great book. All the complicated world building in the universe can't help. It takes a great book first. A stand alone, logical book with secrets and tensions and sparkly character distinctive dialog and rich layered quirky characters and incredible tight pacing. Include taste, smell, hearing, imagery for the eyes, touch—smell, touch, and taste being the hardest to apply. Do it until they drip off your pages, every page.

You can break the rules if you're Meg Rosoff (& congrats on her 2013 NBA finalist award BTW), and I can guarantee you aren't Meg Rosoff.

In RL, I'm a successful business professional and personally hire people on a regular basis. It's always a turkey shoot. The one you think is perfect is dismal. The one I think is a dud but something makes me reach out with an offer turns into the greatest employee with the most empathy for my clients. Apparently the same is true for aspiring authors. Yeah, I know. Should have seen that coming.

The difference is that some people are good employees and some are great interviewers. It is difficult to know which is which--even after all these years. The same applies to writers. Some can talk the talk to sound ready for publication. They have the terms, the concepts, the phrases to make you think they are ready. Then you read... and OMG.

Mary Sue is a term used to describe a character that is an author's self-insertion into the story. It can be idealized, it can be too perfect, or it can be so well masked that the author doesn't realize it. I'm not saying that authors do not instill something of themselves in ALL of their characters, and some more than others. They do. There is a difference however between the amateur and the professional.

The trouble that arises with a Mary Sue is when the writer's ego is tied up inexplicably in the self-inserted character so much that the plot dissolves to ridiculous extremes. It becomes an exercise in self-psychology which the author often ignores--no matter how blatant it is within the pages. If it is such an exercise, I hope she wakes up and reads between the lines to find a resolution to her problems.

I'm going to repeat my first paragraph, because the answer to writing is about your tool box: the number of tools you stick in there and your proficiency with which you apply them.

Stuffing your tool box, improving your craft—those are your goals, not publication. All the world class marketing and publicity ideas can’t make up for the great book. All the complicated world building in the universe can't help. It takes a great book first. A stand alone, logical book with secrets and tensions and sparkly character distinctive dialog and rich layered quirky characters and incredible tight pacing. Include taste, smell, hearing, imagery for the eyes, touch—smell, touch, and taste being the hardest to apply. Do it until they drip off your pages, every page.

Happy writing everyone.